The top reported proficiency rate is 75% in Science. The lowest is 63% in English language arts.
Original Research by School Decision on Ten Sleep K-12
Ten Sleep K-12 is the sole public school in Ten Sleep, Wyoming, serving pre-kindergarten through twelfth grade under Washakie County School District #2. The entire school fits within a single building, and the enrollment is small even for a rural Wyoming campus. This is a school where every grade cohort contains only a handful of students, and that shapes nearly everything about the academic experience, from how test results read to how children move through the day together.
The town of Ten Sleep sits in the Bighorn Basin at the western foothills of the Bighorn Mountains, along US Highway 16 roughly halfway between Worland and Buffalo. It is a very small ranching community where cattle and sheep operations, bentonite mineral extraction, and a modest tourism sector anchored by outdoor recreation in Ten Sleep Canyon form the economic base. The town has experienced long-term population decline, and its commercial footprint has contracted over the years, leaving a handful of cafes, bars, motels, a historic hardware store, a microbrewery, and a gas station. Day-to-day street life is quiet, with activity concentrated around annual events like the Fourth of July rodeo and the August NoWoodStock music festival. The school sits within or immediately adjacent to the small downtown corridor, and there is no separated campus district. The Pioneer Museum, Pioneer Park, and the public library are all nearby, so school and civic life are tightly woven together.
Academically, the most recent state assessment results from the WY-TOPP test tell a generally strong story, with an important caveat about scale. In mathematics, fourth, fifth, sixth, and eighth grades all show a majority of students reaching proficiency, with several grade bands reporting in the upper range. Eighth grade math and science both reflect solid performance. English language arts follows a similar pattern, with fourth and sixth grades showing a clear majority proficient, fifth and eighth grades reaching the upper reporting band, and participation at full attendance across every tested grade. Science results for fourth and eighth grades are also strong.
The one clear soft spot is seventh grade, where both math and English language arts proficiency drop noticeably relative to the other grades. With only a small number of students tested in that cohort, a single year's result can reflect the performance of just a few children. A parent may want to look into this further with the school, particularly whether this reflects a transitional challenge in the middle grades or simply the volatility that comes with tiny class sizes. Third grade results are missing entirely because only one student was tested in that grade, which suppresses reporting under state privacy rules. This is a common pattern in very small schools and does not indicate a lack of assessment.
Positioned relative to districts in Washakie County, Ten Sleep's overall proficiency across tested subjects and grades places it in the top tier of a small comparison set. The county contains only two districts, so the ranking carries limited weight, but the school's proficiency index stands at the upper end of that pair.
Graduation rate data was not available for this school. Chronic absenteeism figures were also missing, as were individualized education program rates and English learner counts. Course access, staffing, discipline, and attendance details were not provided. We searched for recent district-level changes that families might care about and found little of lasting impact, so we left that out rather than guess.
The housing market in Ten Sleep has seen a recent sharp appreciation in home values, with the typical property price rising by a meaningful margin over the past year and sitting somewhat above the state benchmark. The price-to-income ratio suggests that buying a home here requires a larger share of income than the national average, though the absolute prices remain modest by broader standards. No rental market data was available for the area, which is consistent with a very small community where formal rental listings are sparse.
The student body is nearly entirely white, with a small number of students identifying as two or more races and a single American Indian or Alaska Native student. About a quarter of the school qualifies for free or reduced-price lunch, a modest rate for a rural Wyoming community.
What Ten Sleep K-12 offers is a deeply rural, small-scale educational pathway where children spend their entire pre-college years in one building among the same peers. The academic results that are available point to solid instruction in the elementary and middle grades, with the seventh-grade dip worth asking about. Families choosing this school are choosing a tight-knit ranching community at the edge of the Bighorn Mountains, with the trade-offs that come with a declining population and a limited local economy.
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